You may not have known it, but it may now be your civic duty to remove your hat in the presence of a surveillance camera. And don't smile, either—it might confuse the face-recognition software.
If New York City is any indication, this is a coming trend. Banks and other retailers have started to post signs asking customers to remove hats and any other face-obscuring accessories to "help us reduce crime." You see, hats and sunglasses make things more difficult for face-recognition software, as does smiling at the camera.
And it's not just businesses that are racing to identify everyone who walks in the door. The New York Police Department has proposed extending a CCTV network with 4,200 cameras in Lower Manhattan to cover midtown-Manhattan as well. The scheme includes license-plate recognition technology to identify all vehicles entering Manhattan. There's no word yet on whether or not face recognition will be included. However, I'd be very surprised if it's not part of the plan.
Will the new network catch many bad guys? Not unless the city passes an ordinance forbidding anyone entering Manhattan from wearing a hat, sunglasses—or smiling.
If CCTV is mostly "security theater," then what's it really good for? A recently released movie, Look, which presents life in a CCTV-surveilled world as a sort of reality show, provides an important clue. According to Adam Rifkin, who directed Look, in real life CCTV has more to do with titillation than security.
"We went into a mall security office and the guys were not looking for shoplifters. They were zooming in on girls with big boobs and following them around the stores. Those guards told me if they see something really interesting, they post it on YouTube."
Well, now you know the real purpose of CCTV networks. If you're out shopping in Manhattan or most other big cities, and you're a hottie, you just might be on YouTube!
Copyright © 2009 by Mark Nestmann
